Getting Inbound Links

Making your site have more value with search engines has always included inbound links. These links from other sites to your pages have always been considered a “vote” for the value of your page. Why would some site owner link to your page(s) and risk sending a visitor from their site to yours unless they thought it would offer their visitor some benefit which would end up benefiting them as well?

Don’t get me wrong, having pages and navigation on your site that search engines can read, follow and index accurately is important and necessary, but having other sites “vote” for your content is becoming the main factor in getting your site to the top or the search results.

In the old days, before SEO was called SEO, you could have a page with a list of links to other sites and those would give value to the sites that were being linked to. Search engines learned that these “link farms” were of little or no value to their searchers and devalued them completely. Site owners then learned that if they linked to only a few sites per page that search engines still considered these links to have value and proceeded to sell and trade links with other site owners.

Well, the rules have changed again as they always do. Now reciprocal links carry very little, if any, weight even if both sites have value for the searcher. So what you want to get now days are one way links from important sites to “vote” for you.

How do you do that?

There are new schemes that have three, four, or more sites do reciprocal links in circles, but search engines are going to catch on to that as well and you’ll have to start over again. My advice today is the same as it’s always been. Write good content on your site that’s valuable for your human visitors and then other sites will want to link to you. That way you won’t have to worry about what changes are made by the search engines this week, or probably next.

With billions of web pages out there how do other sites find you to link to?
There are many ways to get started and here’s a post on Elites TV with some good ideas that I agree with.

[…] Yesterday I wrote about getting links to your site. One of the ways to do that is by commenting on other blogs. The only problem with that is if your comments are off the topic or completely self serving they will probably be deleted and never see the light of day. Worse yet, they can make it into the post and make you look like a blog spammer. Either way a lose-lose situation. […]